Word Wonders

Red Laser Barcode Scanner for iPhone

You know when you’re walking around with a friend and you see a cool new toy? What do you do?

You point at it.

“What is that?” you say, quickly followed by, “And where can I get one?”

If your friend is the guru of all shopping gurus, she can probably tell you where to get it, who has the best price and exactly when it will go out of style.

If you friend is like me, she’ll go, “Umm, I do not know. Let’s look it up online.”

Until now the non-shopping-gurus among us have been limited to typing text into text boxes to do our online searching. But no longer.

If you have an iPhone and the Red Laser app, you can point your phone at the product’s barcode, scan it

and let the web tell you where you can get it and who has the best price.

(You may still need a fashion-forward friend to tell you if it’s trendy or lame, however.)

Is That All There Is?

Isn’t that enough?

But no, there are more applications than just comparison shopping.

My favorite way to use this is to scan barcodes from the back of all the books in my house and list them all at LibraryThing.com (no more wondering if I have this title or that, when I’m at the bookstore!)

The designers of Red Laser have provided developers with the tools to use their technology in any way that their dirty little minds can come up with, so I’m off to find out what else I could be doing with my new barcode obsession.